What Are You Pretending Not To Know?
It's an uncomfortable question. Because the honest answer is almost always: more than I've admitted.
Three weeks ago, I opened this series with a story about a business partnership that cost us significantly — financially, emotionally, and relationally. If you missed it, the short version is this: I went into business with someone whose character I had seen warning signs about long before we signed a lease together. Small patterns of dishonesty. Comfort with grey areas when they served him. Integrity that was always available when it was easy and negotiable when it wasn't. And then, the week before Christmas, the checks he cut for our staff — thirty people my wife Teresa had personally hired and trained — bounced. (You can read the full story here.)
That story was about the science of deception — about how hard it is to see people clearly, and how love gives us a reference point that the researchers never measured.
But there's a layer I didn't tell you.
And it's the one that matters most for where we're going today.
Before Teresa and I decided to move forward with this partnership, Teresa sat down with a close friend — someone who had worked directly for this man. Someone who knew him not from a distance, the way I had, but from the inside.
And that friend told us, in no uncertain terms: don't do it. This person will create chaos. It will not end well.
We proceeded anyway.
I've spent a lot of time sitting with why. Not the comfortable version of why — not the narrative where I'm the reasonable person who got blindsided by someone else's dysfunction. The actual why.
And I think it comes down to three things. Three places where I was pretending not to know what I already knew.
The first was desire. The revenue potential our prospective partner presented was genuinely compelling. Teresa and I had walked through a difficult financial season, and the possibility of a strong return was intoxicating enough to quietly drown out the signals we were receiving. Desire, I've learned, is one of the most effective silencers of discernment there is. It doesn't argue with the warning. It just turns down the volume until you can barely hear it anymore. And then it smiles and says, see? Nothing to worry about.
The second was pride. I had worked alongside this person for years — as a contractor, at a comfortable arm's length. I told myself that gave me knowledge our friend didn't have. What I wasn't willing to examine was the possibility that our friend, who had worked far more intimately with him than I ever had, might actually know something I didn't. I wasn't humbly curious. I didn't sit with our friend and ask the harder questions — what specifically did you see? What should I be watching for? I dismissed a wise voice because acknowledging it would have required me to question a conclusion I had already reached. That is not discernment. That is pride wearing the costume of experience.
The third was the most significant. Over the years, this person and I had talked many times about integrity, honesty, truth-telling — the very things that sit at the centre of a life rooted in love. And he was fluent in the language. He could speak it easily. But his life didn’t consistently reflect it. Not in dramatic or flagrant ways. Nothing illegal. Nothing outrageous. Just small bends when integrity became inconvenient. Decisions that could be explained in a generous light if you wanted to explain them that way. And I did. Subtle enough to dismiss. Repeated enough to matter. And layered underneath it all was a quiet urgency — the sense that this opportunity might not wait, that hesitation could mean losing something significant. Urgency has a way of disguising itself as wisdom. I recognized the pattern. I just wasn’t ready to name it.
That is what I was pretending not to know.
Issue 1 of this series asked: Why are we so bad at detecting deception in others? (Read it here.)
This issue asks a harder question: why are we so bad at being honest with ourselves?
Because here is what I’ve come to understand, sitting with that question over the years since: my failure wasn’t primarily an inability to read him. It was an unwillingness to read myself. To name what I wanted and acknowledge how much it was costing me in clarity. To sit humbly with a friend who knew something I needed to hear. To take the gap between someone’s words and their life seriously.
The tools we talked about in Issue 3 (Read it here.) — the pause, lateral reading, the SIFT method, the Holy Fool — I had every one of them available to me. Teresa's friend was my Holy Fool. The warning was the pattern. The gap between his words and his life was the lateral read.
I had the instruments. I just wasn't willing to use them on myself.
The Spectator Problem
Here's the problem. We read. We nod. We forward the newsletter to a friend who we're pretty sure needs it more than we do. And then we return to the same patterns, the same blind spots — just slightly more informed about why we keep making the same mistakes.
This is the spectator problem. We consume the content of transformation without undergoing the process.
Discernment cannot be held at arm's length. It begins as a skill we practice. But at its deepest, it becomes something we are — cultivated in the daily, unglamorous, nobody's-watching moments where character is actually formed.
Which means the most important question this series has been building toward is not: how do I get better at reading other people?
It’s this: Can I trust myself? Not just to read others, but to face my own motives honestly and act on what I see. Because beneath every question of discernment is a more personal one: am I safe with me?
Trustworthiness doesn’t begin with how well we read other people. It begins with how honestly we read ourselves — and whether we have the courage to act on what we know rather than explain it away.
It's this: am I the kind of person others can trust — and am I willing to ask that question of myself?
The Inside Work
The qualities that make a person genuinely difficult to deceive are the same qualities that love produces in a person who is actually living it — not performing it, not posting about it. Actually living it, when it costs something.
A genuinely patient person is harder to manipulate through urgency. Urgency only works on someone who is already in a hurry.
A genuinely humble person is harder to flatter into compliance. Flattery finds its grip in pride. When we're no longer preoccupied with our own importance, empty validation has nothing to grab onto.
A person who is genuinely committed to truth is harder to gaslight. Gaslighting creates confusion about what is real. A person who has practiced looking honestly at reality — including the unflattering parts of their own story — has a much sturdier grip on what is actually true.
A person who is genuinely secure doesn't need external validation badly enough to overlook the character of whoever is offering it.
Love, lived from the inside, becomes a kind of immune system. Not because we become perfect detectors of deception. But because the things deception exploits — our fear, our pride, our longing to be chosen — are the very things a life rooted in love begins to heal.
Three Commitments
1. Ask the uncomfortable question. At the end of each day, pause and ask: What am I pretending not to know? Not about someone else. About yourself. Where is the gap between what you believe and how you're living? This is not self-punishment. It is the beginning of alignment — what you believe, what you say, and what you do, moving in the same direction. That alignment is what it actually means to be trustworthy.
2. Become your own Holy Fool. Build a rhythm of honest self-examination. Ask the questions love asks: Was I patient today, or just performing at being patient? Did I keep my commitments — including the ones I made only to myself? Was I honest when it cost me something? The clearest-seeing people I know are the most honest about their own capacity for self-deception. That honesty is not weakness. It is the beginning of wisdom.
3. Build a community of honest witnesses. You cannot grow in discernment in isolation. Invite people into your life who love you enough to say hard things, and who you trust enough to actually hear. Teresa's friend tried to be that for us. We weren't ready to receive it. Becoming trustworthy to ourselves includes becoming humble enough to let people who know us well tell us the truth.
We began this series with a sobering statistic: humans detect deception at 54% accuracy. We end it with something more hopeful — and more demanding.
The goal was never to become perfect lie detectors. It was to become people whose lives are so rooted in love — so marked by honesty, patience, and genuine care for others — that manipulation finds less and less to grab onto. Not because we've become suspicious. But because we've become whole.
That version of us doesn't arrive all at once. It is built one honest question at a time. One moment of choosing truth over convenience. One day of living in alignment between what we believe, what we say, and what we do.
What are you pretending not to know?
Asked honestly and regularly, that question is not a threat. It is an invitation to stop explaining away what you already see, and to become someone whose interior life and exterior life tell the same story.
Until next week, keep leaning into love.
Jonathan Penner | Co-Founder & Executive Director of LifeApp
Who Can You Trust • 4 Part Series
This article is part 3 of a 4-part series entitled “Who Can You Trust”. Follow along as we discover more about trust, deception, lies, discernment, and love. Next week, we’ll explore how discernment and love are not opposites. One is the guardian of the other.
Read the previous articles here:
Resources To Dig Deeper
Book
The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't
In The Scout Mindset, Julia Galef examines why we instinctively defend what we want to believe rather than honestly examine what is true. She contrasts the “soldier mindset,” driven by ego, loyalty, and self-protection, with the “scout mindset,” whose goal is simply to see reality clearly—even when it disrupts our preferred narrative. Drawing on psychology, forecasting research, and real-world case studies, Galef shows that clear thinking is less about intelligence and more about emotional courage: the humility to revise, the curiosity to investigate, and the honesty to ask ourselves, quietly and without defensiveness, what am I pretending not to know?
-Julia Galef
Video
Why You Think You’re Right, Even If You’re Wrong
In this talk, Julia Galef contrasts the “soldier mindset,” which defends what we want to believe, with the “scout mindset,” which seeks to see reality as it truly is. Using the Dreyfus Affair as a case study, she shows how motivated reasoning can blind us while we feel completely objective. The deeper invitation echoes the question at the heart of this newsletter: are we defending a conclusion—or are we willing to see what’s actually there, even if it means admitting what we’ve been pretending not to know?
-Julia Galef @ TEDxPSU (11:27)
Music
Bad Liar
“Bad Liar” isn’t really about deceiving someone else — it’s about the strain of deceiving yourself. The narrator knows the image he’s trying to hold together is “tearing at the seams,” and the repeated confession, “I’m a bad liar,” is the moment the performance cracks. What the song captures is the deeper question: What am I pretending not to know? It brings light to that turning point when denial becomes harder than honesty — and truth, however uncomfortable, starts to feel like freedom.
-Imagine Dragons (4:21)